Miracle Baby
by Serenitychan13
Summary: The team gets a call to investigate the murders of pretty, popular girls in small-town Georgia. The town is convinced the unsub is a strange young woman who was born as a miracle baby - a baby planned for and born to provide a lifesaving transplant for her sister. The BAU, however, is convinced that this young lady cannot be the unsub, and must find the real one.


MACON, GEORGIA

The private Christian high school had just let out for the day. Teenagers poured out of buildings, shouting and chatting and hurrying off to practice, do homework, or do whatever. Teachers watched them go, mostly staying behind to grade papers or call parents or plan for next week. The carpool line, for those not fortunate enough to be driving yet, moved as slowly as molasses. Up in the sky, an unfriendly May-time sun beat down on everyone. It was three and a half weeks before graduation, four before finals, and four and a half before everybody got out for summer. Senioritis and spring fever should have spread like wildfire by now, but something seemed badly wrong. Though the usual "out of school for today" chatter rang about, a pall seemed to hang over the school environment.

Groups of students traipsed past makeshift memorials decorated with stuffed animals, glittery poster paint, and the smiling photographs of three teenage girls. No one could help turning their head and looking over at the memorial as they went by. Things like this just _did not happen _in this town. Nothing even vaguely similar could be found even in their parents' memories. Most of these teenagers even had grandparents who had lived here all their lives. No one in anyone's living memory could think of anything remotely like this that had happened in their town.

All three girls had been murdered. No one knew by whom, and certainly nobody could think of a reason in heaven or on earth why. None of the students knew much in the way of exact facts about the crimes, but enough information had been leaked by parents to create a wild rumor mill. The student body had been gathered into the gym for an assembly after each murder, of course. Besides the girls' individual funerals, the school had hosted student-led prayer services. Furthermore, following the first murder, the female students had been summoned to the gym for an informational talk from the police. They had been told, in increasing seriousness, how to behave to be sure they weren't next. When the second murder happened, and then the third, the police came back to give more talks.

None of the girls at the small, private, Christian high school in the "nice" north part of Macon, Georgia felt safe. The school and the parents tried so hard to make sure that life carried on as normally as possible. Sports practices continued, with the presence of off-duty sheriff deputies, and other after-school activities proceeded with extra chaperones. Games, meets, and other competitions had increased local police presence after each of the murders. They had been about a month apart, now that people sat and thought about it. Police captain David Sapp stared at the calendar on his desk as he spoke to Bibb County chief deputy Rodney Nelson over the telephone.

"Rodney, I'm gonna have to call you back," he informed Nelson, pressing his other hand into his temple. "I'm putting through a call to Quantico. It's a long shot, but with this being the first week of the month, we've got maybe a week before this could happen again."

He could practically hear Nelson looking at the phone oddly.

"You want to bring the FBI down here?" he asked in a voice bordering on incredulous.

Sapp went for his cold, mostly-empty coffee cup and drained it.

"It's more of a 'need to' than a 'want to,' Rodney," he told the chief deputy.

They said their goodbyes and hung up their respective telephones – with that done, Captain Sapp pulled out an old three-ring binder, looked up a number, and punched it in. It took three and a half rings for the line to get picked up on the other end. He heard a female voice say "FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit, Quantico, Virginia – how can I help you?" Captain Sapp took a deep breath.

"This is Police Captain David Sapp in Macon, Georgia," he told the woman on the telephone. "And I need the FBI down here as soon as humanly possible. We've got a serial down here and maybe a week before…"

The woman interjected with "I'll connect you with SSA Jennifer Jareau immediately."

After hanging up the telephone, Supervisory Special Agent Jennifer Jareau got up from her desk and sped out of her office down to Hotch's. Morgan looked up from his texting, having been pretending to look over emails, and nodded to Reid. The FBI's boy genius watched Rossi get up and follow JJ into the unit chief's office. Prentiss maintained at least the façade of being engrossed in whatever was on her tablet screen that none of them could see. Within a minute and a half Hotch, JJ, and Rossi emerged from the office with collective worried expressions. Hotch didn't really even have to give the verbal notice, but he did, so butts left seats and the BAU trooped down to the conference room. Reid took a side trip to re-fill his coffee tumbler, but joined them in a timely manner.

"Okay, we just got a direct call from Macon, Georgia," Hotch announced without preamble. Heads perked up – direct calls had become something of a rarity, what with the ever-growing pile on JJ's desk. "Garcia should be here in the next…"

Before he could finish, a cloud of lavender topped with blonde hair and a sparkly headband hurried into the room, shedding darker purple fun-fur. The absolutely indispensable technical computer goddess/analyst dropped a file folder in front of each of her most favorite people in the world. Morgan's had a purple Hello Kitty sticker on it. Penelope Garcia the Magnificent reached into her homemade tulip skirt's pocket and hit a remote button. A PowerPoint presentation that did _not _look like it had taken mere seconds to put together popped up on the screen. However, the lavender-clad computer deity incarnate did not look happy as she took a seat beside her pet boy genius.

"Senioritis means nothing to scumbags, apparently," she grumbled, pointing a laser pointer at the first picture to appear – a small Georgia high school. "Because it is, like, a month before school gets out for summer, and this guy just has to come out of the woodwork and do this!"

JJ opened the file folder in front of her as Garcia clicked onto the next slide – three professionally-taken pictures appeared on the screen.

"So far, we have a _lot _to work with on victimology," JJ told everyone while Garcia circled the first picture rapidly with the laser pointer. At Hotch's arched eyebrow, she desisted and JJ continued. "Victim one is Sarah Beth Whitman. She was killed back in February on the sixteenth."

The young lady in the picture sparkled in a cherry-blossom-pink pageant dress. Several of the team actually had to blink repeatedly. No one could be entirely sure what shone more in this picture – the girl's Chiclet teeth or the thousands of rhinestones coating the dress. Her hair was nearly as wide as her shoulders in perfectly sculpted blonde-with-blonde-highlights curls. A tiara sparkled as it perched atop this coif. Every bit of this girl, from her bright blue eyes, enhanced with contacts, to her French-tipped fingers, to her button nose, screamed "perfect." A small white-gold cross hung just above her collar bone from a delicate chain. She had clearly been coached for this picture from the beginning of her waking life. JJ looked down at the notes Garcia had provided for her.

"Entered in beauty pageants since she was six months old, has won multiple crowns and titles," the blonde read, starting to feel exceptionally uneasy. With the files to come, she realized she had known each of these girls back in her own home town. "Straight-A student, active in her church – she sings in the choir and coordinates a little-girl pageant for her youth group. She's also a student athlete – runs track – and sings in her school's show chorus. Of the three victims, she is the only one who was a senior at time of death."

Prentiss and Garcia nodded at JJ, both of them understanding the "girl-text" there. Spencer dutifully took notes. Rossi looked vaguely disturbed by the amount of _pink_ in the picture. The sash around the girl's shoulder bore the legend "Cherry Blossom Queen." Morgan twirled his pen in his fingers and nodded as he took in this information. Pink didn't really faze him anymore. Hotch, privately, had never been able to comprehend the whole pageant thing. All of a sudden, he felt a lot more grateful for Jack than usual. JJ nodded and Garcia flicked on the next slide.

"Victim number two – killed March nineteenth – is Aubrey Marie Allan, sixteen when she died," JJ informed everyone, indicating the slide with a nod. "Starting to see a pattern already… She's an honor student with a 4.0 GPA and heavy church involvement. She's a softball player…"

The picture showed a young woman wearing her softball jersey with a pair of Levis. Her honey-blonde hair had been braided to the side. She smiled, showing another set of bleached-white teeth to the camera, with one hand on her hip and cowgirl boots on her feet. Her picture had been taken outside, with a pine tree directly to her left. A gold cross necklace stood out as her only piece of jewelry besides plain gold posts in her earlobes.

"And not only was she a star pitcher on the school team, but she coached the boys-and-girls T-ball team at her church," JJ continued. "She was on her way to a softball scholarship, and had a couple of wins for extemporaneous speaking in the GISA literary event."

Morgan tilted his head at the screen.

"GISA?" he repeated as an inquiry.

Before Garcia could even find it in her notes, Spencer had spoken up.

"The Georgia Independent Schools Association," he told everyone automatically. "It's an organization of Georgia private schools – covers everything from faith-based private academies to some homeschool groups to larger, almost public-sized private middle and high schools."

"Right," JJ confirmed. "So, essentially for one of these girls to win something for the GISA is to basically win state, but in the private school system."

She nodded to Garcia again and the slide changed over.

"And, last victim – number three – is Raeanne Harper Hoyt," JJ read off before looking up at the third photograph. "Also sixteen when she died, she was killed on April fifteenth…"

Raeanne Harper Hoyt definitely formed the middle of the road between the glitzy pageant girl and the softball player. Her picture had been taken at the most recent year's homecoming football game. Like Sarah Beth, she wore a sash from shoulder to shoulder – she had been voted sophomore duchess to the homecoming court – but her black and white strapless dress was a bit more subdued. Her highlighted blonde hair had been pulled back from her face in an up-do and a few curls hung down beside her cheeks. Like the other girls, she had French tips on her nails and a bright white smile that seemed to have been cut-and-pasted from a magazine ad. Her cross necklace had a small diamond in the center of it.

"This is starting to feel like I'm reading the same thing for all of them," JJ commented before continuing. "But she's got a straight-A average, sings in the school's concert choir and does drama, and… Surprise! She's a student athlete too – she runs cross country and plays soccer. She's a praise team leader in her church, and last year did a mission trip to Mexico with her youth group."

Morgan cracked his neck loudly and set his pen down.

"So, we've got somebody going after pretty blonde overachieving good girls," he summed up, wishing he could go eat a large burger to wash out all the saccharine from those pictures. "Have we got a signature?"

JJ flicked through a few more pages in the folder Garcia had put together. For her part, the analyst got up, set the remote at JJ's place at the conference table, and vacated the room. There were some things she really could only handle once, and making the PowerPoint had been enough. Prentiss tapped a few things on her tablet and reached over for the remote. She clicked the button and three photos popped up on the next slide. For all the team had seen, these were middle-of-the-road gory. All three young ladies from the previous photos appeared again, this time at their crime scenes. Under those, their morgue photos popped up underneath.

"All three official causes of death were blunt force trauma to the head," JJ read from her paper. "They all have broken acrylic fingernails, and Aubrey and Raeanne have ante-mortem bruising around the throat. All three girls had an approximately inch-wide section of hair cut off towards the back of the head and their cross necklaces were missing."

Hotch and Rossi exchanged looks – this one seemed like it would probably wrap up in a couple days, tops. The worrisome bit came with the timing. Unless they _did _get this unsub bagged soon, another girl would very likely die. Morgan checked his iPhone and mentally went over his go bag. Reid gave a furtive glance around as he pulled his cell phone out of his pocket. Trying to be discreet about setting his pencil down on the table, he flicked the apparatus open. He pretended not to notice Prentiss rolling her eyes at him as he text-messaged Lorraine quickly.

"_Going out of town on a case,_" the genius typed as quietly as he could. Hotch shook his head – the kid just never would get it… Spencer continued to text, "_Be home soon._"

He closed the phone and stuck it back in his pocket, looking appropriately embarrassed at the glance Hotch shot in his direction. Other than that, the unit chief pretended not to notice as Rossi just chuckled under his breath. Hotch stood and the rest of the team did the same.

"Well, we're headed for the Atlanta airport and we'll meet agents from the Atlanta branch there to drive down," he informed the team as everyone began to gather their things. "We'll have to move fast – Macon is a small town and people aren't going to want to talk. Wheels up in thirty."


End file.
